could be “of here and everywhere” (Oth. 1. 1. 135 – 36 ). For within this newly
circulated depiction of Africa, Moors, Jews, Negroes, Romans, Goths, Turks,
Arabians, Persians, Muslims, Christians, and Europeans intersect and inter-
act as the forces of economics, conquest, chance, and convenience dictate.
More than the historical representations it stands beside, The Historyunset-
tles Africa’s boundaries and “unmoors” the Moor from constructs of color,
religious or ethnic purity, and place, giving precedence and prominence to
the unpredictable dynamics of cultural change and exchange.
For starters, Africanus (the voice translated by Pory) makes clear that the
first Africans were not, in fact, “Africans,” in any ethnically pure sense; they
likely immigrated from Asia or what is now the Middle East. Africanus is
nonplussed by the uncertainties and impurities of their origins. Acknowledg-
ing that “historiographers doe much disagree” over the matter, he asserts that
“the originall of the people of Africa” (by which he means northern Africa)
were either Palestinians, “expelled out of their owne countrie by the Assyri-
ans,” “Sabeans a people of Arabia foelix,” “put to flight by the Assyrians or
Aethiopians,” or descendants of “certaine people of Asia,” chased by wars to
Greece and then to Africa (Africanus, 129 , 130 ). “The first that euer inhabited
these partes” and for whom the continent itself may have been named,
Africanus reports, was probably an outsider, “Ifricusthe king of Arabia
Foelix,” who was forced from his Middle Eastern homeland into Carthage
(Africanus, 122 ).^19 Within The HistoryNegroes stand distinct from these, “the
tawnie people” or “Moores,” having a decidedly different African homeland
and history (Africanus, 130 ). Long after Barbary had been settled, according
to Africanus, they were “found out” in “great numbers” in the “land of Ne-
gros,” as if they had always been there, living “a brutish and sauage life, with-
out any king, gouernour, common wealth, or knowledge of husbandrie,”
outside the realms and reach of civilization (Africanus, 819 ).^20 Yet as offspring
of one of the sons of Chus (the North Africans of the other), they shared not
only the biblical lineage but also the geographical dislocation of the northern
Africans, descending, Africanus posits, from the Philistines (“Philistims”)
whose country of origin bordered on Israel (Africanus, 130 ).
If the “originall” Africans were from elsewhere, so were defining parts of
their culture, asThe Historymakes clear, their customs, place-names, lan-
guages, and religions evolving over time, through a series of conquests and
changes in rule. The new Africans in the north were conquered in succession
by the Romans, Goths, and, in places, by the Arabians as well as by “some
other forren people” who founded and named innumerable cities and towns
Cultural Traffic 143